Saturday, September 12, 2015

Hilarious unsold pilots

You think some of today’s shows are strange? Friend of the blog and writer extraordinaire, Lee Goldberg
once wrote a book listing unsold TV pilots from
1955-1990. He has recently updated it. You can buy it here. I recommend it. Some of these are priceless. These are actual projects. Writers pitched them with a straight face and sold
them. Scripts were commissioned and then networks said, "Sure, we'll
shell out millions of dollar to make these". Can you imagine what didn't get picked up? Anyway, with the new development season in full swing, let's go back and relive past gems.

DANGER TEAM ABC-1990 – Kathleen Beller plays a
bookkeeper-turned-private eye who solves crimes with the help of three
animated clay figures. (Whatever happened to Kathleen Beller (pictured
above)? She was soooo hot.)

GOOD AGAINST EVIL ABC-1977 -- Dack Rambo is a writer who
happens to fall in love with Satan’s girlfriend. (Don't you hate it
when that happens?)

HIGH RISK ABC-1976 -- Six former circus performers team up to
solve crimes. (A better title might have been JUSTICE DU SOLEIL.
Notice how many of these delightful dramas were developed by ABC?)

JUDGE DEE ABC-1974 -- Khigh Dhiegh is a roving judge in
seventh century China, deciding right and wrong and solving crimes. (We
had an idea for a show but it was set in the eighth century and no one wants that era.)

MADAME SIN
ABC-1972 – Maybe my favorite of all of them. Bette Davis as an
all-powerful dragon lady who kidnaps a former C.I.A. agent (Robert
Wagner), brainwashes him with a special ray gun, and enlists him in her
high-tech global intelligence agency that operates out of her Scottish
castle. (Again, I'm not making these up. I couldn't.)

MOMMA THE DETECTIVE CBS-1981 – Esther Rolle (from GOOD TIMES) as a maid who solves crimes.NICK KNIGHT CBS-1989 – I bet we see a new version of this in
like five minutes. Rick Springfield is a crimefighting vampire on the
San Francisco police force. HURRICANE ISLAND & STRANDED – two of the many “people are shipwrecked on a remote island” pilots. But none of them had the hatch.

ETHEL IS AN ELEPHANT CBS-1980 -- A New York photographer who shares his apartment with a baby elephant.

GREAT DAY ABC-1977 -- As described: “This pilot was supposed
to illustrate how fun life is as a skid row bum in New York’s bowery.”
Featured in the cast: Billy Barty and Spo-De-Odee.

A LITTLE BIT STRANGE NBC-1989 – A widower raising a bizarre
family. He and his son are warlocks, his daughter is a witch, his
mother-in-law is psychic, his brother a soul-singing bat (yes, a bat), and his nephew is made of mud. A “normal” girl marries into this family.

MARS: BASE ONE CBS-1988 -- A family adjusting to life on Mars,
where they live next door to a Soviet technician and his
American-stripper wife. (Note: the 1988 WGA strike forced
cancellation of this project. I think part of the problem was that they
wanted to shoot on location.)

MIXED NUTS ABC-1977 – (not to be confused with MIXED NUTS -- one
of the worst movies of all time) The lives and hilarious misadventures
of the doctors and psychiatric patients of a mental institution.

MR. AND MRS. DRACULA ABC-1980, 1981 -- The Dracula family moves
to a New York apartment. In the second version they live in the South
Bronx. Okay, now that makes sense. SGT. T.K. YU NBC-1979 – Korean stand-up comic Johnny Yune is a
Korean LAPD detective/stand-up comic. (This pilot was in competition
with one of ours, about a guy-girl comedy team. And neither got on the
schedule. Instead, NBC picked up PINK LADY AND JEFF, a comedy-variety
show starring a stand-up comic and Japanese girl group who couldn’t
speak English. Sometimes the most absurd pilot gets on the air.)

Tomorrow: More pilots include one
with Alan Alda raising an invisible baby and Sonny Bono fighting crime.
You're gonna wanna be here!

I had a friend who could recite Chapter and Verse of several episodes of "Forever Knight". Note the operative word - HAD. This kind of weirdness was one of his more normal quirks. BTW, I think the show was produced here in Canada.

I don't have the experience you do Ken, but from what I saw the idea that the 'best' thing gets on the air was rarely right. There are a lot of decisions and people and politics that go into what gets picked up. Even what pilot gets made and who directs it. The quality or not quality of the work isn't the final issue. Nor, I suppose, should it be as what is being made isn't binary. Shows can succeed because of the timeliness of their POV, a particular actor or writer ETC. And what's good isn't always what audiences watch.

As I recall, the beginning of Robert Altman's "The Player" is best known for the continuous shot, but the other thing is that the movies being pitched in that sequence were all supposedly real movie plots that had been pitched--and of course were mostly insane.

The Howie Long series from 1988 seems to be incongruous to me; given that Long was still smack in the middle of his NFL career at the time, I have to wonder if he would have committed himself to doing a potential weekly series.

Of course, I could see him doing movies and guest appearances on TV(a la what O.J. Simpson did during his career), but not a regular show.

Aaron Sheckley, you very probably DID see "Judge Dee". There was a Movie of the Week called "Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders" and, though melodramatic, it was surprisingly faithful to the original book (the story was fairly melodramatic to begin with)If I remember rightly it was unusual for the time in having an all-asian cast playing all the parts

Was delighted to see there's a Kindle version, and I purchased it (having promised I would when Lee visited these pages once before.) One of my favorite popcorn books ever. I also saw some of these pilots when they aired. I hadn't seen MADAME SIN and sent away for a tape of it some years ago - very odd. I've also seen GOOD VS. EVIL, but mostly found it boring. Actually, MADAME SIN was pretty boring.

"(Whatever happened to Kathleen Beller (pictured above)? She was soooo hot.)"She had eyes as big as the moon. The shot of her coming out of the pool in THE BETSY was forever emblazoned in my adolescent brain. THE BETSY was one of many movies Sir Lawrence Olivier made when he was slumming for big bucks.

"Notice how many of these delightful dramas were developed by ABC?) "I'm guessing some of this was on Fred Silverman's watch when he was running amuck there.

"Dack Rambo is a writer who happens to fall in love with Satan’s girlfriend."I remember he was a good-looking guy who couldn't act and had a twin brother, also an actor.

"Maybe my favorite of all of them. Bette Davis as an all-powerful dragon lady who kidnaps a former C.I.A. agent (Robert Wagner), "I'm sure Miss Davis was a treat to work with on that set! Wagner lucked out. This was just two years after IT TAKES A THIEF end. After this pilot failed he did COLDITZ, SWITCH and HART TO HART without missing a beat over the next decade plus. Odd to see his name here. He was the victim of a death hoax on Thursday.

The Judge Dee film is available on YouTube. It's pretty good (which isn't surprising given the talents involved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunted_Monastery

In 1974 the novel The Haunted Monastery was produced as a TV movie by Gerald Isenberg with the title Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders.[3] It was filmed with Khigh Dhiegh as Dee and an all Asian cast (including Mako, Keye Luke, Soon-Tek Oh and James Hong). Writing was credited to Nicholas Meyer and Robert van Gulik. It was nominated for and Edgar Award, for Best Television Feature or Miniseries in 1975.

I don't know if it's true or not but actor David McCallum said he was asked if he wanted to do a TV series based on the biblical figure he played in "The Greatest Story Ever Told". He sensibly told them he didn't think a series about Judas would last long.

I saw a documentary years ago about Hollywood and one part was about the worst scripts people had read. One of the people interviewed, I think it was producer Lawrence Gordon, said he was sent a script and the premise was: man turns into a hamburger.

I'm pretty sure I saw Momma the Detective around that time (1981). There's a scene where somebody offers to do Momma's taxes for free, and she shows up with a huge basket of unsorted receipts. That's about all I remember. You could probably have gotten three seasons out of the audit alone.

I saw Madame Sin (basically a female Fu Manchu) in the 1970s when the networks still showed unsold pilots in order to make back some of their money. The star of the film was actually Betty Davis, not Robert Wagner, as he is disposed of at the end of the episode as one supposes Madame Sin eventually does to all of her pawns.

All I'll say is: Heil Honey, I'm Home! (UK, 1990). Adolf & Eva move in next door to the Goldensteins. 6 episodes filmed, 1 aired. The rest is history. Pilot here. I suppose it's a satire of American sitcoms as much as anything.

"Mr & Mrs Dracula Move In Next Door" was an excellent childrens' programme that ran for 5 series: Young Dracula (UK, 2006-2014). The Countess ran off with a werewolf, living the Count with the kids. Pilot here.

Ah, Kathleen Beller. Remember her well. Had just been appointed TV critic for The Columbus Dispatch in 1977 when she came through town promoting, I believe, the made-for-TV movie "Mary White." She was very pleasant but was attired in a distracting tight sweater and kept stretching, which served to accentuate her, ahem, form. A great baptism to star interviews.

I wonder if it "Ethel" was an elephant reincarnation of his mother, this pilot would've probably sold...And yes, I remember watching Judge Dee as a weekly TV movie. It was surprisingly good, but then I was a teenager then. I haven't watched it since them.

Friday question: There was a show called ROLL OUT, starring Stu Gilliam, "from the producers of M*A*S*H." It was about a group of black soldiers in WWII. Did you have anything to do with it? Not the war, the show.

There was a short-lived late '80s show by that name starring Teri Garr (she played the "evil" sister). The Dack Rambo pilot Ken mentioned was called "Good Against Evil," and apparently was a decade or so earlier.

I recall a half-hour animated special based on Carlton, the unseen doorman from "Rhoda." Aside from some cartoony gags (Carlton disguising his ill-tempered cat as a tenant's dog, after said dog has a coronary in Carlton's care), it played like a sitcom episode down to the final freeze. Always wondered if that was one-off goofery or an actual pilot.

Another oddity was "The B.B. Beagle Show", a note-for-note American knockoff of "The Muppet Show" with a cast of puppets and human guest stars. A couple of intended laughs, but the real entertainment was the sheer brazeness of the imitation.

"Micro" something was obviously inspired by Innerspace. Two alien cops in a flying craft pursue a criminal on earth. Because they're microscopic in size, cops and crook slip into that week's guest humans and manipulate them as Dennis Quaid manipulated Martin Short. About the same time somebody aired the similar "What on Earth", about benign aliens who study earth at arm's length. One alien goes out in the field and violates the prime directive by helping a pretty guest star, having sex with her, and trying Mexican food.

Favorite comedy one-shot was "Inside O.U.T." starring Bill Dailey. It was a "Mission Impossible" parody, and their plan involved lowering a chimp through a vent into a bank. It turned out the bank had a uniformed chimp security guard, leading to undercranked chimp combat. Their mission, by the way, was retrieving currency upon which drunk mint employees replaced Lincoln with a coworker.

"Return of Sherlock Holmes" (1987) had Margaret Colin as a Watson descendent who defrosts the great detective Her proper, gentlemanly Holmes had to bring himself up to speed on technology and other changes (He walks into an Adult Book Store, assuming it's reading matter for adult reading levels. He walks out, shell shocked.). The film was a light comic mystery and loaded with clever references. "Sherlock Holmes Returns" (1993) had another female Watson standin and a sexier Holmes in modern San Francisco. It was more obviously a pilot.The idea of a defrosted Holmes actually flew -- sort of -- in an animated series that delayed his awakening to the 25th century. It was a strange beast, mixing sci-fi reworkings of the original stories with attempts at educational value and kidvid insipidness.

Wow! I auditioned for Ethel Is An Elephant. I can't remember anything about the script except for something about an elephant. The director was the terrific John Astin. Came network close to getting the part, but it eventually went to Todd Sussman, another good guy and also part of the MASH family.

Good Lord! I clicked on the link to 'Heil Honey I'm Home'. I thought it was a joke, but it was real. Setting aside the poor taste for a moment, I have to ask the question, What planet do TV producers live? And how hungry as an actor do you have to be? Jeez, I thought my opinion of Hollywood was pretty low before, but that dreck sets a new low.

I shut it down after five minutes but I'm sure I'll never be able to un-see it. Thanks @Mike, I owe you one.

"The Return of Sherlock Holmes" with Margaret Colin and Michael Pennington was very funny and could've been a good series, if handled right. Another good scene is when he finally wanders into Lake Havasu after being stranded in the desert and thinks he's gone to heaven.

FOREVER KNIGHT was what NICK KNIGHT apparently ended up as. They just moved the setting to Toronto so it could get those sweet Canadian subsidies. I liked it, at the time. I wonder if it's still good...

About KEN LEVINE

Named one of the BEST 25 BLOGS by TIME Magazine. Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. In a career that has spanned over 30 years Ken has worked on MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, WINGS, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BECKER, DHARMA & GREG, and has co-created three series. He and his partner wrote the feature VOLUNTEERS. Ken has also been the radio/TV play-by-play voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres. and Dodger Talk. He hosts the podcast HOLLYWOOD & LEVINE

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